The richest man of the world Elon Musk announced a multi-billion dollar question on Twitter in response to the proposal of “Billionaires’ tax” by Democrats in the US Senate. He asked his 62.5 million followers whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stocks to not cause tax evasion.
The billionaires’ tax will make the billionaires pay ‘unrealized gains’ tax whenever the prices of the stocks goes up even if they do not sell any shares. In response to this, the CEO of Tesla tweeted,
“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock.
Do you support this?” with a Poll- Yes or No.
He also added in another tweet,
“I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes”.
Tesla is on peek in the market, it has reached a height of $1 trillion valuation which is about $1000 billion and Elon Musk as CEO owns a very big part of Tesla of about 170.5 million shares as of 30 June and selling 10% of it would be approximately $21 billion. Other investors did not like the way Elon Musk tweeted to make a decision as it may undermine their potential value in the company.
He explained that he had no other way to generate cash but to sell stocks:
“Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.”
Elon Musk may want to sell stocks because of tax but followers guess that there can be some other important buried projects going on in Tesla which needs capital. Whether he sells shares or not, it’s going to be in the spotlight for the next few days. Elon Musk is rolling dices now to decide.
